Daily report: ITU Council 2019 – Day 1

Attached is a very brief, high-level report on the activities of Day 1, 10 June, of ITU Council 2019. Included in the summary report:

  • Locations of ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2022 and World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly 2020
  • Actions taken by Council on documents presented during the day, including on proposals to improve ITU Plenipotentiary processes and ethical principles for ITU election campaigns

Too long; didn’t read: report of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation

On 10 June 2019, the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation released its report after nine months of work. It’s a dense 47 pages, and even its executive summary needs to conform to UN standards, so isn’t as easy to read and digest as a non-UN document would be. To help time-poor readers get a high level overview of the key suggestions and recommendations in the report, we’ve created this “Too long; didn’t read” summary:

Post-meeting report: CSTD 22nd annual session

Every year, the Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD) negotiates updates to the draft ECOSOC resolution on World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) implementation and follow-up. While very few non-government stakeholders follow the CSTD’s activities these days, its negotiations on the WSIS draft resolution are worth understanding, since they very much reflect the same arguments on the same WSIS and ICT for Development (ICT4D) topics that take place not only in the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) meetings, but also at the United Nations General Assembly.

The post-meeting report on the negotiations below adopted Chatham House rules, naming none of the Member States who proposed, or argued against, the various issues documented in the ECOSOC resolution, including enhanced cooperation, Internet governance, the Internet Governance Forum and WSIS Forum.

Pre-meeting report: ITU Council 2019

Our small team at Nissaba is proud to release, just in time for the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Council 2019 meeting in Geneva that starts next week, a pre-meeting report summarising the main issues that will be up for discussion amongst ITU Member States.

Why are we doing this?

While the large ITU events, such as the Plenipotentiary Conference and the World Telecommunication Development Conference get all the headlines, it’s the less reported events such as ITU Council and Study Group meetings where most of the real work happens. What happens at Council, Council Working Group and Study Group meetings eventually moves up the chain of discussion and consensus-making until it eventually reaches the Plenipotentiary for consideration of all ITU Member States. If you want to influence discussions, or just understand what is likely to come up in the larger events down the track, you need to be aware of what meetings like the ITU Council 2019, are discussing, debating and making decisions on.

The pre-meeting report below should be useful not only to government representatives who have ITU as part of a large portfolio, but also to non-government stakeholders who want to learn more about how ITU Member States plan to put the big decisions made at Plenipotentiary Conference 2018 into action.

NEW: Updated version 1.1, dated 11 June 2019 referring to documents and issues posted to the ITU Council 2019 website since June 6, now available! It is also available from the linked image below. Additions are signposted in red text.

Original version, from 6 June, still available here.